The MIT Technology Review's annual list of the world's smartest companies is creating some buzz. Facebook didn't make the cut. Neither did Apple. Google did. But it finished third behind Tesla Motors and behind this year's king -- San Diego's Illumina.

"Illumina, the smartest of all, wowed us," the magazine says in its March-April issue. "The company exploits the fundamental copying mechanism of DNA in order to read the sequence of a human genome ... Through technology it invented or acquired through Solexa, Illumina has forced an astounding increase in the pace of sequencing and an equally astounding drop in sequencing's cost (five times faster than Moore's Law).

"Illumina's machines are beautiful to contemplate: so slick they don't have a single button and so powerful they can generate a genome for $1,000. (By contrast, the Human Genome Project cost $3 billion; as recently as 2006, it cost $10 million to sequence a human genome.

"Illumina's technology is truly disruptive. In richer companies, everyone's genomes will be decoded. The impact will be new categories of drugs, better matching of therapeutics to the patients who will benefit most, and startling insights into what makes us human."